Bayard Van Duyvil and his wife Annabelle seemed to be living such a charmed life when one night Bay is found dead with a knife in his chest and Annabelle is nowhere to be found. With Annabelle thought to be drowned and a murderer to be found the press is all over the story of how this privileged couple ended up the way that they did on that fateful night.

Bay’s sister Janie is convinced that someone out there killed her brother and did harm to his wife and is determined to find out what happened. Janie forms an alliance with a reporter to uncover the truth of that night. With rumors flying all around of affairs and murder everything Janie thinks she knew starts to unravel.

The English Wife by Lauren Willig is a historical fiction novel with a bit of a mystery and a touch of romance within the pages. The story is told by alternating looks into the past to build the charactrers and their story that led to that night along with keeping up with the events in their current time of 1899.

For me this was one that I really wanted to love but unfortunately found myself struggling to connect and enjoy leaving me rating this at 2.5 stars. The biggest problem in my mind was simply the pacing was so incredibly slow with a lot of randomness added in that didn’t feel necessary in my opinion. Also it was a bit tough to connect to characters when struggling to remember who was who with a lot of them similarly named. This one just ended up not my cup of tea unfortunately but others just may enjoy the slow burn mystery.

Well shit…. I saw this on NetGalley and was like I loved all the historical books Carrie has been posting about recently so I want to give this one a try and today it was approved!😒😒😒 Grrr… Fantastic Review Carrie! I wish you enjoyed it more!😟

Well you may always like it more than I did of course but it’s one you have to pay attention or get confused but then the pace is similar to a snail and my attention kept wandering so definitely not one for me.

Unfortunately it was another I had to push myself to wade through and finish. Could easily cut 100 pages or more and tell the same story. But it didn’t help naming a bunch of characters practically the same (Georgie, Georgina, George, Georgiana, Giles, Janie etc etc) then when it comes to alternating between 1895 and 1899 it’s all just historical to me if it’s over a century ago. LOL